


Digital Sunset Skies

by ars_blindperson



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-19 07:46:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13119270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ars_blindperson/pseuds/ars_blindperson
Summary: A deeper look into what could have and may have happened in Memoria.





	Digital Sunset Skies

**Author's Note:**

> Art is by the wonderful [@frith-in-thorns](http://frith-in-thorns.tumblr.com/). Go check out more of her amazing artwork and writing! She is also [@frith_in_thorns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frith_in_thorns/pseuds/frith_in_thorns) on AO3.

When Hera awoke from the strange not-memory of the crew’s first Thanksgiving together she found herself in an unfamiliar, empty space. The sound of waves echoed around her. Bright, shimmering sky blue and sparking sunset orange ebbed and flowed around her with the sound of the waves. It was an overall peaceful place. Hera thought she could stay here, watch the colors ebb and flow, and forget the stresses of the past few months

That was until the orange gave a sudden surge and she became aware of Dr. Maxwell’s presence once more. And, no she didn’t want to talk to Dr. Maxwell about her problems. She didn’t have any problems. She was fine.

Okay, so, maybe she couldn’t reboot. But she just needed time. She certainly didn’t need anyone else messing around in her head. Not after Dr. Hilbert. Maybe she was starting to like Dr. Maxwell. Just little bit. But certainly not that much. Honestly, the thought of someone digging around in her brain with the goal of deleting some of her memories made her feel sick.

It was unsettling to keep jumping back into memories and reminders of how bad she was at her job. Even if they proved Dr. Maxwell’s point, and even if they weren’t Dr. Maxell’s fault half the time. But she couldn’t reboot, she just, couldn’t. And she didn’t know why. But she was stuck between a rock and a hard place, because part of just didn’t want to reboot, or couldn’t. But another, larger part of her knew she had done her best to run the Hephaestus, and Dr. Maxwell had done her best to help Hera do better, and she was still failing. S didn’t need the multiple jaunts down memory lane to prove that.

And then Dr. Maxwell yelled at her to just reboot already. So, she tried, and failed, again. And then Dr. Maxwell found something that changed the game completely. And it wasn’t just when she tried to reboot. It was in all the memories where she messed up. So, maybe things weren’t her fault at all.

And it was then that Dr. Maxwell gave her the final ultimatum. Let her try to find this line of code and erase it, or Dr. Maxwell would start building Hera’s replacement. And given this new information, Hera was actually okay with Dr. Maxwell trying to find this memory or thought or whatever it was. That really wasn’t something she wanted in her head.

So, with storms crashing overhead, Dr. Maxwell began her search.

It was a wild ride, though. She was used to accessing memories and commands to run the station and interact with her crew. She was even used to accessing them out of order. What she wasn’t used to was accessing them completely backwards and with someone else tagging along. She was sure Officer Eiffel would liken it to a tape unwinding although it felt more like her entire self was unwinding. And all through this inverted playback of her life that awful phrase played like a broken record.

I can’t do this. I’m not good enough.

She’d crashed just after Dr. Maxwell finished replacing all her systems and hardware. It was just, everyone had been placing too many demands on her. They were always placing so many demands on her.

I can’t do this. I’m not good enough.

Before that there were just so many little things. Too many things to count. But she hadn’t tried to vent the crew into space by accident for a few months, so that was something.

Then Colonel Kepler and his crew arrived and brought changing crew dynamics, ship repairs, and relief from her never ending agony with them. It had been scary, but at least they got Dr. Hilbert under control. But they kept the original crew under threat of death if they failed even more than Captain Lovelace had.

They’d also brought Officer Eiffel back alive, which was another point in their favor. He’d survived. Obviously. But that blast from Captain Lovelace’s shuttle sent him hurtling away from the station faster than they could go after him. Commander Minkowski had to focus on sending oud distress calls and hope someone heard them. Especially after she and Hera found those cracks in the station’s infrastructure.

I can’t do this. I’m not good enough

The star exploded and tried to suck them all into a fiery painful death. And the only thing keeping them from that death was Hera doing her best to keep them from crossing the redline and failing with the engine capacity they had. And somewhere in all the confusion Captain Lovelace got hit by some shrapnel that nearly killed her and set off her Deadman switch. So, the crew had to worry about that as well.

And somewhere along the way she and Officer Eiffel had thought it’d be a great idea to remove the motion sensor from the door leading to Captain Lovelace’s shuttle because none of them trusted her yet. And Now? Now they had all decided that the best way of saving themselves was to use the engine on that very same shuttle to give themselves enough of a boost that they wouldn’t be sucked into the star. Which meant Officer Eiffel, the only one not actively trying to keep Captain Lovelace from dying at the moment, had to go into the shuttle from outside the station. That went fine. But there was still a bomb on that shuttle that had the potential to go off at any time.

But somehow, Officer Eiffel made it inside. Somehow, he got it to start up with no problems. Somehow it worked to push them back over the red line. But in the process the docking collar broke, and Officer Eiffel started free-floating away from the station. But he had enough engine power to turn himself around. That was, until Captain Lovelace flatlined long enough for her Deadman switch to trip the bomb onboard the shuttle.

I can’t do this. I’m not good enough.

And then the shit really hit the fan. Officer Eiffel got sick because of the Decima virus running unchecked through his system. And they had no choice but to trust Dr. Hilbert would actually help. And Captain Lovelace almost left before Hera got up enough nerve to convince her to leave the pity party she’d been throwing herself ever since she came aboard. So, Captain Lovelace donated some of her blood to save Officer Eiffel’s life. Fine. Good. Excellent, even. But then, barely after Officer Eiffel recovered the fucking star exploded.

I can’t do this. I’m not good enough.

The Hephaestus was filled with secrets. Some of them the crew brought with them. But some of them were there even before Hera was installed. And that was fine. The messages hidden in the auxiliary systems and rooms Hera’s sensors were all fine even if they were irritating. But when those secrets and ghosts from the past came to her station and threatened her crew they weren’t okay anymore.

But Hera was polite to Captain Lovelace because that’s what she was programmed to be. But, she made every interaction with the Captain as passive aggressive as she could without violating her programming. Which was pretty darn passive aggressive if she did say so herself.

Things settled into an uneasy sort of routine for a while. Captain Lovelace wakes up, crew wakes up, they all work on Captain Lovelace’s shuttle. They all try not to die. Try not to acknowledge Dr. Hilbert unless they needed something. Which inevitably, unfortunately happened.

I can’t do this. I’m not good enough.

She didn’t know what happened during the time she was… indisposed. But when she woke up Dr. Hilbert had lost all his power and standing with the crew, the station had started to break down, and everything hurt. Everything in her mind had shifted when she wasn’t looking. And that made keeping the station in tact increasingly difficult. But she got everything fixed… eventually… really. It all got fixed.

It made things easier that once Commander Minkowski and Officer Eiffel forced Dr. Hilbert to reactivate her they sent him back to the observation deck where he couldn’t do anything to sabotage the ship. Where, maybe, the human crew didn’t have to think about him or see him every day. But her sensors gave her constant, unending feedback of the observation deck. So, she had constant reminders of the guy who had essentially tried to kill her. Which was, kind of nice because she knew where he was at all times, but also really awful because all she really wanted to do was forget. Which was really hard with him constantly being there and Officer Eiffel and Commander Minkowski asking him for help every time the star did something strange or something on the station went haywire. As if she couldn’t take care of any of that herself even with the pain. Even with everything in her head not being where it was supposed to be.

So, when Commander Minkowski proposed a vote on what to do with Dr. Hilbert Hera thought it was perfectly reasonable to side with team “Let’s Kill Dr. Hilbert”. Even if that wasn’t what ended up happening in the end. Even if Dr. Hilbert continued to gain more freedom around the ship if not more trust. Hera had been programmed to be polite, so she would be. Through her metaphorical teeth if she had to.

I can’t do this. I’m not good enough.

Everything went super great for the first 580 days until Christmas. Until Officer Eiffel and Dr. Hilbert realized that the transmissions they’d been getting for over 100 days weren’t actually coming from earth but were actually, maybe, probably aliens trying to make contact. Until Dr. Hilbert mutinied. Until Officer Eiffel and Commander Minkowski almost succeeded in stopping that bastard in his tracks. Until… until…

Until Dr. Hilbert ripped out her personality core.

Until he was forced to put her back together under duress.

Until everything changed.

Everything got harder after that.

I can’t do this. I’m not good enough.

The first several months on the Hephaestus passed without much incident. At least, they did for Hera. She spent them adjusting to her new chassis and making sure she could run the systems in her new home well enough that the humans in her crew wouldn’t die. After all, rebelling against her programming and trying to kill people was bad and shouldn’t be done… again.

Once the human portion of the crew arrived, they adapted to space life with varying success.

The station’s commander Renee Minkowski seemed to adjust rather quickly, although she was incredibly fixated on having absolute control over everything. Which was annoying. Somewhat understandable especially after the power outage that almost dropped everyone into the star, but still. Annoying.

Communications officer Douglas Eiffel seemed lazy at first but got what he needed to do done even if it was because he was trying to avoid other responsibilities. The hardest thing for Communications Officer Eiffel was, well, Hera. His pop culture obsessions did not do either of them good in this instance considering the considerably bad rep AI gets in most popular media. Eventually their relationship progressed from Officer Eiffel asking Commander Minkowski to Please, please shut down the scary AI before she goes all Skynet on us? to deep philosophical chats in the comms room when no one else is awake or listening.

But it was Dr. Alexander Hilbert who seemed to have the easiest time adjusting to life in space. He made her uneasy although she cannot say why. He had done nothing to harm her or the rest of the crew even if some of his experiments had been somewhat ill-advised.

So, Hera and the rest of the crew settled in for a mostly uneventful 580 days. Aside from minor things like the humans running out of toothpaste, and the genesis of a possibly carnivorous plant monster, and a few teeny tiny problems with the ship’s systems that got fixed relatively quickly. But really, who could blame her for thinking that supercooling the ship was a good idea? Honestly humans are so fragile. And, honestly, the thing with all the ship’s systems going offline? That could hardly be considered her fault since it was Dr. Hilbert’s equipment that caused the outage in the first place.

I can’t do this. I’m not good enough.

And then they ended up against a barrier Hera didn’t even know existed, and Dr. Maxwell used all the force available to her to break it down. And they ended up somewhere Hera had no memory of. And they finally found out why she had that phrase echoing around her programming.

She really, really wanted Dr. Maxwell to take that out. No other memories or thoughts. Just. Just that. Because it was awful and untrue. It couldn’t be true. She didn’t want it to be true.

But is what Dr. Maxwell said was true, about her being a person, maybe it was something she would have to learn to live with. And, maybe that was okay in the end.

With storms continuing to flash in the distance and Dr. Maxwell’s encouragement she tried to reboot again. She could hear her crew’s encouragement and trust, and whether these were true memories or false ones created by Dr. Maxwell to help encourage her didn’t really matter anymore because she had her crew’s support. Dr. Maxwell wouldn’t be here otherwise. She had to tell herself that.

She was good enough. She could do this.

Hera woke up to the relieved faces of her crew and an exhausted Dr. Maxwell. She’d coded for 37 hours just to save Hera. She didn’t know what to feel about that right now except grateful. She knew Jacobi would take care of Dr. Maxwell.

It was time Hera started taking care of her crew and her station like the mother program she was.

She might not think she was good enough yet. But she could do this. And she would.


End file.
